How to think about brand when you don't have a product yet
How to think about brand when you don't have a product yet
A short working guide to brand building at an early stage startup
In a conversation with me a few weeks ago, Vijay, my CEO, was discussing what we needed to focus on as a marketing team for Atomicwork. We are a pre-product startup, and as product/engineering are building, marketing is exclusively focused on brand. I had a framework in my head, but I wanted to know his thought process.
He said there were three brands in play for Atomicwork, and that we needed to focus on them differently.
These were:
The Customer Brand - What the customer sees us as
The Employer Brand - What potential employees see us as
The Market Brand - What the startup ecosystem sees us as
These were what we would work on, in that order he said. Why? First, we want our prospective customers to start hearing about us, then we need engineers and talented people to know that we are a good company solving an important problem, and third, we want our ecosystem to know and champion us.
This is a simple premise, and I can break it down into individual elements: What do I need to do to build up each of these? Is there something I can create consistently? Answering these questions means that I can then get all of these rolling in the direction we want it to. I will need a few clear answers from product and leadership to go and do this, of course, but when I ask, they will know why I’m asking.
This is what I need at this stage, and it lets me go do my work.
What did I have in mind, though?
As I have always said, the most powerful thing an early stage marketing team can do is create content. Rocketlane did it, as did SuperOps. Freshworks and Wingify did well before anyone even thought of this as a framework. My plan was the same. With a small mental shift.
I wanted to be sure that the content I create was part of a a larger whole, of something that appealed to our target audience not just now, or three months from now, but seven or eight years from now. Great brands are built by doing interesting things for boring amounts of time, and I wanted to build that platform first. Once I did that, the team could just show up and let compounding do its job.
So I had broken up what I wanted to build as separate goals and activities. There are about 5 things I want to create/do, and with the team being just two people (we have interns and design help), that is all we can focus on.
What exactly are these things? You’ll see soon enough.
Two things to remember here: Be clear about what to invest in, because you need time for it to work. You need to keep at it for that period of time, at least. Next, play to your strengths. We have our own, and what we create will lean heavily towards what we are already good at.
But what about at other stages, when the product is making revenue, and you are the head of marketing. How to think about brand then?
When at Wingify, I tried to spend between about 25% of my budget on investing in things like long term content or even topical events. The forecast was that this would help me a quarter later. For instance, a report we worked all of a quarter to create made the next quarter one of the best we ever had. This can be classified as brand spend. It worked, and we moved on to the next quarter. If we had kept doing that report every year, that would have become a brand that kept us in the frame of reference much longer.
And yes, what constitutes brand building for one sector/startup may not be brand building for the other. Take events. For one startup, events may be a source of high value leads. For others, they may mainly be a way to show up to gain the audience’s attention. There is no generalised playbook for this. You have to write your own.
I’m certainly trying.